In the article Sun's Jonathan Schwartz said, “Amazon knocked the ball out of the park,” For Sun, the opportunities are with mid-size and large corporations — like banks, pharma and financial companies — that need to build their own clouds because they cannot use Amazon type on-demand computing due to certain legal and regulatory limitations." He went on to say, “Then you’ll be paying attention to the announcement we make tomorrow with what we’ll be doing with Amazon.”
For once I actually completely agree with this. One of the biggest issues I've had with Amazon Web Services has been trying to convince larger companies to use a "book sellers" on demand infrastructure. For startups this hasn't been a tough sell, for larger companies, the pitch has been a bit more problematic. Pitching cloud computing within the context of a Rackspace, Sun, IBM or even an existing data center might make cloud computing more attractive to the fortune 500 crowd. Sun definitely has it's foot firmly in the door to make this happen and at the end of the day what Amazon has done is show, in a real world context, how to build a service oriented infrastructure that actually scales.
I'm just not sure if Sun is just chasing another pot at then end of the yet another rainbow, or this bit of vapor has some substance. Needless to say, Sun's history in this space has been partly cloudy at best.
Check out the article here: http://gigaom.com/2008/05/04/sun-amazon-web-services/
I'll keep you post as I learn more.
---
Updates
---
Some More details, possibly involving Sun's ZFS file system at informationweek.
--
According to Cnet
Sun said it has partnered with Amazon.com to release OpenSolaris as an on-demand service as part of Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). OpenSolaris will be available for operating system and storage services as part of the overall EC2 service, which starts at 10 cents per CPU-hour, the company said. Sun touts OpenSolaris as the most robust Unix-flavored operating system.
